Resolutely Determining to Journey with Jesus, 26th Tuesday (I), September 28, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Tuesday of the 26th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Lorenzo Ruiz and Companions
September 28, 2021
Zec 8:20-23, Ps 87, Lk 9:51-56

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily please click here: 

The following points were attempted in the homily:

• Today we come to the fulcrum of the Gospel of St. Luke, when he tells us that Jesus “resolutely determined to journey to Jerusalem.” Literally in the Greek it means that he “fixed his face on Jerusalem” and began the journey of ascent to the place where he would offer his life on the Cross for us all and complete his salvific mission. It would be there that Jesus would ultimately fulfill the prophecies announced by Zechariah after the exile. It would be to Jesus, the true temple destroyed and rebuilt in three days, to Jesus on the Cross, that people from different cities would say, “Come, let us go to implore the favor of the Lord,” “I, too, will go to seek the Lord, and “Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.” It would there, on Calvary, that the refrain for the Responsorial Psalm today, “God is with us,” would take on new, salvific meaning.
• But before he would do that, he was going to try to include the Samaritans in that saving mission. He had already been to Samaria before, where he met the woman at the well. The end of that scene had the Samaritans all exclaiming in Sychar around the well of Jacob, “We have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the savior of the world.” Because, however, Jesus was planning to head on to Jerusalem, with whom the Samaritans had been in a theological war for centuries, “they would not welcome him.” They put their disagreement with the Jews above receiving their Savior! And when the Boangerges brothers — the Sons of Thunder, John and James — sought to call down fire from heaven on the Samaritans as God had once destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, we see that they, too, had taken their eyes off of Jerusalem and Jesus’ salvific will. So Jesus, rather than rebuking the Samaritans (which he easily could have), rebuked James and John.
• The failure of both the Samaritans and the Boangerges teaches us a valuable lessons: many times we can put our own grievances, our own petty scores to settle, above God and the work of salvation he wants to accomplish. We can take our eyes off of Jesus and off of where Jesus has set his eyes. We can put conditions on God’s saving work, like the Samaritans tried: “We’ll allow you, the Savior of the World, to enter our village provided that you promise that you won’t go to Jerusalem!” Even though all of us recognize how silly it is when the Samaritans of yesteryear do it, we need to become more conscious of the way we likewise refuse welcoming Jesus. He tells us, for example, in St. Matthew’s Gospel that whenever we refuse to give food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, care to the sick, welcome to the stranger, clothing to the naked and visits to the imprisoned, we fail to welcome him in need (Mt 25:31-46). We also see it when we refuse the Cross, like St. Peter and the apostles initially did when they reprimanded Jesus after he said that he would be betrayed in Jerusalem, suffer at the hands of the religious and civil leaders, be beaten, scourged and murdered. Still today many do not want to embrace Jesus’ determined vision about the way he wishes to be with us, united with us on the path of sacrificial love we call the way of the Cross. They seek Christ without the Cross, a Christianity without suffering, The Cross remains a scandal and a folly for many today, just as it was for many at the time of the apostles. What happened in Samaria is simply one more illustration of what St. John described in the prologue to his Gospel, that Jesus “came to his own and his own received him not.”
• The positive moral of the story is to keep our eyes fixed on what Jesus wants, and not to become so distracted by others’ rejecting Jesus that we in fact do the same. It’s a similar lesson to what Jesus teaches in the Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds. When the workmen want to rip out all of the weeds, the Farmer tells them to be patient, to let them grow to harvest time when they’ll be separated, but instead to focus on the growth of the wheat. For us, we need to focus first not on others whose face is not on Jesus and on all he accomplished for us in Jerusalem, but on how resolutely our attention is fixed on the Lord, whether the compass of our heart is set on the holy target of Golgotha and whether we’re in fact journeying there with him.
• Today the Church has us focus on those who kept their eyes fixed on Jesus all the way and followed him to Calvary and through Calvary to heaven: St. Lorenzo Ruiz and his companions, martyrs in Japan. St. Lorenzo, the first Filipino saint, was married with three kids and was a very good calligrapher. It seems that he may have murdered a man in the Philippines; regardless, he was accused of murder and was fleeing the charges and the death penalty that came with them. He got on a boat with Dominican priests, a Japanese priest and a leper, and landed in Japan. Soon thereafter he was arrested during the ferocious Tokugowa shogunate. The Japanese sadists went through their normal mind games with their prisoners trying to get them to apostatize and it seems that St. Lawrence asked the question whether his life would really be saved if he denied his faith. But he didn’t deny it. When they were about to torture him by hanging him upside down by his heels over a pit with a cut behind his ear so that he would bleed to death over three days, he said, famously, “I am a Catholic and wholeheartedly do accept death for God; Had I a thousand lives, all these to Him shall I offer.” Sustained by grace, he kept his face resolutely on Christ crucified. His story gives all of us hope, that no matter our failings, as long as we’re alive, we still have a chance to give our life one-thousand times over for him who gave his for us. And we still have a chance to receive others, even thousands of times, in a martyrdom or witness of Christ-like paternal love.
• Every day at Mass, we are able to say, in the words of Zechariah the Prophet, “Come! let us go to implore the favor of the Lord” and, “I too will go to seek the Lord.” This is where God is with us. This is where we behold the Lamb of God, the Savior of the World, who can’t keep his eyes off of us. Let us ask him as we prepare to receive his Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, to give us his eyes, so that we might keep our eyes always on the target he has set and on the Father in heaven, where we hope, with St. Lorenzo and his companions, to behold him always in the beatific vision!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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